Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in 2018. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other 'crew members' on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled.

"It is unfortunate to be announcing that 'dearMoon', the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled," the mission's official account on the social media site X said. "We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project."

Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its 'crew leader,' Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023.

Enlarge / A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China's Shandong province. (credit: VCG via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don't use the wrong names.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea's latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country's northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.

The highly anticipated test flight—the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean.

This mission will carry no payloads as SpaceX seeks additional flight data about the performance of the complex Starship vehicle. It is simultaneously the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and the first launch system ever intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Enlarge / SpaceX's fourth full-scale Starship rocket undergoes a fueling test Monday. (credit: SpaceX)

After three test flights, SpaceX has shown that the world's most powerful rocket can reach space. Now, engineers must demonstrate the company's next-generation Starship vehicle can get back home.

This will be the central objective for the fourth Starship test flight, which could happen as soon as early June, according to Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO.

"Starship Flight 4 in about 2 weeks," Musk posted on X, his social media platform, following a Starship countdown rehearsal Monday at the Starship launch site in South Texas. "Primary goal is getting through max reentry heating."

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right). (credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

There are a couple of ways to read the announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that it's kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX's plan to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from Florida.

The FAA said on May 10 that it plans to develop an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX's proposal to launch Starships from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA ordered this review after SpaceX updated the regulatory agency on the projected Starship launch rate and the design of the ground infrastructure needed at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the historic launch pad once used for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Dual environmental reviews

At the same time, the US Space Force is overseeing a similar EIS for SpaceX's proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of LC-39A. This launch pad, designated Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), is available for use after United Launch Alliance's last Delta rocket lifted off there in April.

Enlarge / On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX's Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.

The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.

The study looked at résumé data from People Data Labs and used "260 million résumés matched to company data." It only examined three companies, but the report's authors noted that Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX represent 30 percent of the tech industry's revenue and over 2 percent of the technology industry's workforce. The three companies have also been influential in setting RTO standards beyond their own companies. Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina and scholar at the Academy of Management, told the Post that despite the study being limited to three companies, its conclusions are a broader reflection of the effects of RTO policies in the US.